Dachan Bay, Qianhai, Bao'an District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, on Nov. 11. Under a vividly blue sky, colorful container boxes and yellow cranes packed the coastline. Just as they began to grow tiresome, the view suddenly shifted alongside a black "Tencent Headquarters" sign. Curved, spaceship-shaped buildings rose over water-drop-shaped lawns and asphalt roads still glossy from little use. Beside employees dressed in short sleeves and shorts, fitting for a tech company, blue beetle-shaped autonomous shuttles moved busily about.
Tencent invited foreign correspondents that day to unveil its new headquarters being built on reclaimed land east of the Dachan Bay wharf in Qianhai, Shenzhen. With total construction costs of 31.9 billion yuan (about 7.15 trillion won) and an area of 809,000 square meters—a quarter of the size of Yeouido—this vast future city is officially named "Internet+ Future Sci-Tech City," but is commonly called "Penguin Island" after Tencent's penguin mascot. Since breaking ground in 2021, it is now 30% complete, and pilot operations began in October last year, with 28,000 people having moved in so far. Upon completion, its maximum capacity will reach 80,000 people, roughly seven times more than the previous headquarters (12,000 people).
Penguin Island's biggest feature is that it is not simply an enlarged business district but a single "new city" capable of meeting all the demands of daily life. It is a space where all the infrastructure needed for a city is concentrated: office spaces where 80% of employees can enjoy an "ocean view," employee apartments renting at around 2,000 yuan a month—half the level of nearby areas—as well as a bilingual school covering the full elementary-to-high-school curriculum, cultural and sports centers, a hotel, and even a sewage pumping station and waste collection facilities. It is also a testbed for the many "new technologies" Tencent has secured. Robot dogs roam the grounds using independent walkways to conduct 24-hour patrols, and digital twins can be used to monitor electricity usage, equipment failures, and security incidents in real time.
Behind Tencent's ability to build this vast smart city was Shenzhen's unstinting support. In November 2019, Tencent won the plot at about 4,260 yuan (about 950,000 won) per square meter, effectively the lowest possible price. Qianhai is a special zone Shenzhen created in cooperation with neighboring Hong Kong, offering benefits such as a preferential 15% corporate income tax rate for resident companies and reduced personal income tax burdens for foreign and Hong Kong talent. Called the "Manhattan of the Pearl River Delta (the Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Macau economic zone)," this prime real estate was effectively obtained at a bargain price. Local media at the time pointed out that Shenzhen authorities had already named Tencent as a major prospective resident company from the time of the bid selection announcement, effectively supplying the site tailored to Tencent. This came with assessments that after Huawei, suffering from chronic office space shortages, eventually relocated its terminal headquarters to nearby Dongguan, Shenzhen made the decision to keep Tencent, which faced a similar problem.
It was a generous reward to Tencent, which shared in Shenzhen's development history. Tencent started in 1999 with the QQ messenger, which was effectively a direct imitation of the U.S. ICQ messenger, but subsequently expanded successfully into gaming, easy payments, cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI), becoming, alongside Alibaba, one of the two undisputed Big Tech giants. A key driving force is cited as its absorption of the solid support policies and infrastructure of Shenzhen, which as the center of reform and opening had nurtured the science and technology industry early on since the early 1990s. Indeed, after first setting up its nest in Huaqiangbei, a mecca for startups, Tencent moved its headquarters to the Nanshan High-Tech Industrial Park—where leading companies such as Huawei and ZTE had already gathered—for full-scale expansion after its 2004 listing, absorbing talent. Tencent then grew rapidly, ranking first among Shenzhen-based companies with tax payments of 59.1 billion yuan (13.3264 trillion won) as of 2024.
As a result of intensively nurturing advanced companies early on, Shenzhen has emerged as a mecca for China's leading tech companies, including not only Tencent but also Huawei, DJI, and BYD. Coincidentally, with BYD added last month, all four companies have been placed on the U.S. Department of Defense's blacklist, positioning Shenzhen as a key battleground in the U.S.-China technology war. But they are undeterred, flaunting their technological self-reliance. At BYD's headquarters in Pingshan District, visited later that day, the company showcased the world's first mass-produced vehicle-mounted drone system integrating DJI drones into its own vehicles, displaying its technological confidence. Regarding the sanctions, a BYD official stressed, "If competition in the U.S. market disappears, that is actually a bad thing for them," adding, "Regardless of sanctions, not only U.S. consumers but also leading companies such as Nvidia frequently come to this showroom here."
Shenzhen, too, is providing ample ammunition for these companies' hegemonic competition against the United States, such as by offering rights to apply for industrial land to large companies headquartered in Shenzhen for expanding headquarters and research bases. It has also declared that it will build up a 100 billion yuan AI robotics industry by 2027, accelerating efforts to nurture the next generation of Big Tech.
